Alexander McQueen’s "Savage Beauty" Retrospective Is Set to Break Records Again at the V&A

Encore, Alexander McQueen! Today’s official announcement that the designer’s "Savage Beauty" retrospective will open in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum next March is no surprise to his fans. Sixteen hundred people have already bought tickets to the exhibition that famously brought record-breaking numbers (661,509 visitors to be precise) of fashion pilgrims to the Metropolitan Museum show in New York in 2011.

McQueen’s homecoming exhibition is to feature more material focussing on McQueen’s roots as a British upstart in London, from his Central Saint Martins MA graduate collection of 1992 through his first seven shockingly sensational shows—boundary-crashing experiences that dragged fashion into the realms of art performance. The resonance of the location is a very personal one: McQueen sourced many of his historical inspirations in the archives of the V&A—as he put it, “It’s the sort of place I’d like to be shut in overnight.”

As it was in its New York debut, the immersive labor of love will be created by his friends and collaborators creative Sam Gainsbury and production designer Joseph Bennett, in tandem with V&A curator Claire Wilcox, and in consultation with Andrew Bolton at the Costume Institute of the Met. This time, the showstopper promises to be a life-size re-creation of the hologram ofKate Moss that had floated like an apparition in a glass pyramid in his Widows of Culloden show for fall 2006.

The show is slated to run from March 14 through July 19, 2015—though, who knows? Considering the overwhelming public response to the Met’s "Savage Beauty," the V&A ought to be thinking over contingency plans for an overrun. Already, it’s hoping visitor numbers will rival the David Bowie exhibition, which drew global audiences to the museum in 2013. Anyone who experienced the McQueen original is predicting that must be a done deal.